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Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

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Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#31

Post by abruzzi »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #9

maybe i'm just a jerk, but it bothers me when someone posts a project and doesn't link to an example of give a full description. i have no idea what anki cards are so i googled it and it's a pretty cool little open source flash card program. most people aren't going to do the research so it's best to have an explanation what all the components are. you don't have to be overly verbose, just a one liner explanation is…

I had the same response, so i googled it. The home page that came up for the Anki application (https://apps.ankiweb.net) doesn't really explain what it is either (it has a lot of fluff about how its useful and where its useful, but no actual information on what it does and how it does it.) I had to go to the docs link and read a good way into the user manual to get a sense of what it actually does. Still I'm not 100% sure I know what it is and how it works. Ok, its a flash card app. There have been hundreds of those going back to at least the 80s. And before that people were writing on 3x5 cards for a very long time. How is this better or more useful that?

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#32

Post by zozbot234 »

retrac wrote: post #28
tunesmith wrote: post #11

I basically ruined myself for Anki. I started like gangbusters, and also created some really cool jazz music theory decks for myself that have lilypond notation snippets and sound samples of various chord qualities and advanced jazz modes. And this is on top of other subjects like ML, scala, logarithms, etc. And then... I hit this mathematical limit where I just couldn't keep up. You can't add 20 new cards a day for…

I've been using Anki to memorize Chinese characters. It's near-ideal for the task. It's a pretty memory-hard task, and I find a sustainable average is only 2 - 3 new cards a day. I've done stretches where I've done 20 new characters and I pay for it in the reviews for weeks and weeks. It feels frustrating too since you keep reviewing the same 5 or 10 items that won't "stick". I find SRS software like Anki is best tak…

> It feels frustrating too since you keep reviewing the same 5 or 10 items that won't "stick".

I think the idea is that eventually you'll be recalling even those "leech" items, due to the sheer exposure you're getting in the meantime. Frustration is part of the game.

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#33

Post by zozbot234 »

abruzzi wrote: post #31
thrownaway954 wrote: post #9

maybe i'm just a jerk, but it bothers me when someone posts a project and doesn't link to an example of give a full description. i have no idea what anki cards are so i googled it and it's a pretty cool little open source flash card program. most people aren't going to do the research so it's best to have an explanation what all the components are. you don't have to be overly verbose, just a one liner explanation is…

I had the same response, so i googled it. The home page that came up for the Anki application ( https://apps.ankiweb.net ) doesn't really explain what it is either (it has a lot of fluff about how its useful and where its useful, but no actual information on what it does and how it does it.) I had to go to the docs link and read a good way into the user manual to get a sense of what it actually does. Still I'm not 10…

It's not just a plain old flashcard app, the point is to implement a scheduled recall system to help you memorize the content effectively while minimizing effort.

Anecdotally, it's also a lot more engaging than your average flashcard app. Using Anki feels like playing a video game, except that you also get quite valuable results out of it.

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#34

Post by jldugger »

tunesmith wrote: post #11

I basically ruined myself for Anki. I started like gangbusters, and also created some really cool jazz music theory decks for myself that have lilypond notation snippets and sound samples of various chord qualities and advanced jazz modes. And this is on top of other subjects like ML, scala, logarithms, etc. And then... I hit this mathematical limit where I just couldn't keep up. You can't add 20 new cards a day for…

There's probably a masterclass in the making regarding this, but the Anki defaults can and probably should be tuned. In particular, the multiplier for time between reviews should be tuned until you're hitting about 80 percent successful reviews. I've doubled mine and it really helped.

I think there's also a setting to limit new cards based on review size, and that also helps avoid review hell. I imagine it's not the default because a popular use case is students in courses where there are high stakes deadlines.

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#35

Post by jldugger »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #9

maybe i'm just a jerk, but it bothers me when someone posts a project and doesn't link to an example of give a full description. i have no idea what anki cards are so i googled it and it's a pretty cool little open source flash card program. most people aren't going to do the research so it's best to have an explanation what all the components are. you don't have to be overly verbose, just a one liner explanation is…

I figure the appeal of this tool is largest to those who already use author flashcards in Anki. There's been a number of posts related to Anki in the past year on HN, so there is some overlap.

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#36

Post by banana_maker »

jldugger wrote: post #34
tunesmith wrote: post #11

I basically ruined myself for Anki. I started like gangbusters, and also created some really cool jazz music theory decks for myself that have lilypond notation snippets and sound samples of various chord qualities and advanced jazz modes. And this is on top of other subjects like ML, scala, logarithms, etc. And then... I hit this mathematical limit where I just couldn't keep up. You can't add 20 new cards a day for…

There's probably a masterclass in the making regarding this, but the Anki defaults can and probably should be tuned. In particular, the multiplier for time between reviews should be tuned until you're hitting about 80 percent successful reviews. I've doubled mine and it really helped. I think there's also a setting to limit new cards based on review size, and that also helps avoid review hell. I imagine it's not the…

It's kind of well known that anki has some seriously bad defaults for long term studying. Not to plug myself but I've written about this at length. [0]

There are a few big issues, but the easiest one to fix is the reset interval.

When you forget a word that you're reviewing (that is, when you hit "Again"), anki resets the interval to 0%, as if it were a totally new card.

This is bad for 2 reasons. 1) A lapse is not the same as learning a completely new word. When you review a lapsed card you're just refreshing that connection that you've already made. So it's wasteful to completely reset the interval unless you've really totally forgotten the word.

2) The interval reset can be huge (going from 7 months to 1 day) so it makes it tempting to just hit "Hard" instead. I know I've done that.

The fix here is to set a more reasonable reset value like 40-60%. I use 45%.

---

The other big issue is the algorithm works differently than you would expect. I discuss this in more detail in my post, but essentially anki gives each card a modifier value. Starting at 250%. Every time you hit Again/Hard/Easy, it -- permanently -- modifies this card. This is quite unintuitive! When people grade a card, they're really grading their own memory / ability to recall. Not how hard the card itself is.

Why is this bad? Because if you hit "Hard" a lot, then you're seriously capping the interval growth rate for a word. In other words you'll see it way more often than you need to. Most people don't hit "hard", -then- "easy" once they learn it. A lot of people I know hit "hard" to be on the safe side instead of "good", purely out of habit. This picture explains why a low modifier is bad. [1]

The way I fix this is by using 2 plugins: the first makes grading buttons not modify a card's modifier, and the second one resets ALL cards to 250%. Low-Key anki goes over this in detail. [2]

However! This fix assumes a relatively homogeneous deck in terms of card difficulty. I.e. words for a language. If you're studying, say, algorithms or something where the difficulty may be heterogeneous, then you may want anki's default behavior.

[0]: https://andrewzah.com/posts/better-anki-usage-guide-2019/

[1]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/andrewzah.com/posts/017/ease-exampl...

[2]: https://massimmersionapproach.com/table-of-contents/anki/low...

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#37

Post by banana_maker »

retrac wrote: post #28
tunesmith wrote: post #11

I basically ruined myself for Anki. I started like gangbusters, and also created some really cool jazz music theory decks for myself that have lilypond notation snippets and sound samples of various chord qualities and advanced jazz modes. And this is on top of other subjects like ML, scala, logarithms, etc. And then... I hit this mathematical limit where I just couldn't keep up. You can't add 20 new cards a day for…

I've been using Anki to memorize Chinese characters. It's near-ideal for the task. It's a pretty memory-hard task, and I find a sustainable average is only 2 - 3 new cards a day. I've done stretches where I've done 20 new characters and I pay for it in the reviews for weeks and weeks. It feels frustrating too since you keep reviewing the same 5 or 10 items that won't "stick". I find SRS software like Anki is best tak…

The default leech threshold for Anki is 8. (You have to fail recall 8 times after graduating a card from new status). I recommend lowering this to 4.

If you keep on failing to memorize a card, then you should suspend or delete it. I know this sounds crazy, but you end up wasting so much energy on those cards; energy that you could have spent on memorizing characters that you don't struggle with. When you do anki for years this really adds up.

If that character is "important" relative to other characters, you can take it outside of anki and write like 15 sentences with it, etc.

You can filter by suspended (or leeched, I think) cards easily. What I do is set aside time once every ~2 weeks to go through my suspended cards and see if they need to be modified to be simpler, etc.

What really kills you is missing reviews. I did kanji study at 10-15 words/day for a few months, and then missed reviews due to work/life issues. Going back and slogging through that backlog of ~400 reviews was very demotivating.

I recommend changing the defaults of mixing new cards and reviews, to showing reviews first. That way it's easier to focus on knocking out reviews, which only really takes like ~15-30 minutes. Even at 20/cards day.

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#38

Post by banana_maker »

s_m_t wrote: post #16
tunesmith wrote: post #11

I basically ruined myself for Anki. I started like gangbusters, and also created some really cool jazz music theory decks for myself that have lilypond notation snippets and sound samples of various chord qualities and advanced jazz modes. And this is on top of other subjects like ML, scala, logarithms, etc. And then... I hit this mathematical limit where I just couldn't keep up. You can't add 20 new cards a day for…

Why were you adding 20 new cards a day? IMO its better to adjust your new card rate based on your retention rate. Your ideal retention rate probably depends on how you react to the "stress" of missing cards. Personally it would majorly stress me out if my retention rate was below 80%, I ideally liked to keep it around 90-95% because for me this was where it went from feeling like work to actually being fun and exciti…

An ideal retention rate is about 80-90%. 95% means you could be challenging yourself more (if desired).

https://eshapard.github.io/anki/target-an-80-90-percent-succ...

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#39

Post by banana_maker »

sjy wrote: post #29
elliotec wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 new cards per day to review is the default. You can add as many or as few as you want but if you didn't change the default it will put 20 in your review queue daily.

It’s only going to put 20 new cards in your review queue daily if you have a huge backlog of unseen cards, which will only happen if you mass import a whole bunch of pre-made cards, which is not recommended. Actually creating 20 new cards a day would imply a pretty heavy study schedule.

> It’s only going to put 20 new cards in your review queue daily if you have a huge backlog of unseen cards

Correct. However, using a huge premade deck is not a bad idea in the sense that it's a huge time saver.

For me, creating an anki card takes between 1-2 minutes, depending on how slow the dictionaries (plural) are. So, 30-60 words per minute (45 avg) means it would take me almost 4.5 hours to input a measly 200 words.

I can write down 200 new words from one episode of a tv show. You can see where this is going. For Korean, about 5-6k words are recommended to begin having non-basic discussions. 5k words at 45 words/hour is ~110 hours.

Instead, I suggest using a parent deck that has a premade deck + your personal deck as children. This lets you have the best of both systems. You can use the Hoochie Mama! plugin [0] to properly randomize your review queue for child decks. Anki by default pulls cards in order from child decks.

Note: All of this assumes that your pre-made deck is of good quality. I can't speak about other languages, but Evita's Korean deck (5.8k cards) is sorted by frequency. It's fairly good, at least until you get to more of a intermediate level.

[0]: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1460733408

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#40

Post by dguo »

deckar01 wrote: post #12
thrownaway954 wrote: post #9

maybe i'm just a jerk, but it bothers me when someone posts a project and doesn't link to an example of give a full description. i have no idea what anki cards are so i googled it and it's a pretty cool little open source flash card program. most people aren't going to do the research so it's best to have an explanation what all the components are. you don't have to be overly verbose, just a one liner explanation is…

Technical writing is a skill. Little things like linking related topics requires foresight into the range of knowledge your audience could have. It is easy to assume everyone shares the same knowledge you do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Thank you so much for adding that Wikipedia link. For years (no exaggeration), I've been trying to remember the term for the problem of forgetting what it was like to not know something. I was never able to come up with the right search query.

And now I'm going to add it to my queue for making Anki cards.

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